V° The Deprived Human Being

V° The Deprived Human Being

My final thesis led me to focus my research on the issue of humankind as being characterized by its lack.

Are we all beings suffering from various kinds of needs? And does that define us as human beings? Do we spend our whole lives striving endlessly to bridge this gap, to fill our voids? Immersed between desires and perversions, humankind yearns for plenitude. But the road is long and strewn with obstacles before we manage to reach this final stage!

These reflections were to define the axis of my research that I would undertake during my time at Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris 1).

By exploring the photographic medium above all, I started to develop a corpus of works questioning the forms of the reality and complexity of the human being put under pressure. From my desire to explore narrative forms, I went on to create fictions in which the cinematographic registry is strongly present. These images form a tableau of captured moments, a patchwork of invented stories, echoing and reflecting multiple angles of a distorted reality.

The scenes follow one another, highlighting characters who are confronted with themselves and with a world that encompasses them yet transcends them. Tension is highly present. The atmosphere is awash with fantasy, madness, dreams, nightmares and other surreal shapes, though firmly rooted in vivid expressionist momentum.

The question of identity is echoed in the exploration of image, of iconicity and different forms of representation.

This same period of my life marks my exploration of the alternative cultures in which I evolved, and whose codes are highly present in many of my works and research.

My performances formed a corpus that sought to study a certain perspective of the world, yet this part of my research focuses on the interiority of humankind, emphasizes very specific angles, and combines various fields of study: psychology, psychiatry, criminology, sociology, fetishism, … This extensive work led to a significant amount of meetings and exchanges throughout the world and the result was to complete my final thesis entitled Phenomenology of the Deprived Human Being: Between Desires and Perversions (under the direction of Michel Sicard, Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris 1), 2012).

It was also through this opening to the world that I began to develop my first curatorial experiments.

Stephane Roywww.stephaneroy.fr